It's a breath of possibility in a place that has operated for decades as an overblown debtor's prison, cue hushed conversations in the streets between burned-out labourers who once dreamed of building paradise. As the game begins, the corporation running the arcology has mysteriously gone bankrupt, which means that everybody's contracts are in limbo, together with ownership of utilities such as the AIs and power generators at the bottom of the world. Most of The Ascent's citizens are indents, interplanetary pioneers who must now spend their whole lives paying off the cost of travel. But the narrative premise is quite intriguing. These garrulous souls aren't so much personalities as grab-bags of attitudes harvested from TVtropes. The writing is routine cyberpunk fare: overcompensatory c0rpoSlang and edgy self-interest, with characters ranging from an apoplectic crime boss to a wintry mercenary captain - Hitman's Diana Burnwood after a trip to the ripperdoc. OK, not quite: there's also hacking, but it's a glorified gating feature/back-tracking incentive, with beefier cyberdecks letting you crack encrypted treasure chests and disable the forcefields that separate city districts. So what do you do in this astonishing setting - the work, would you believe, of a dozen developers? Having blown three paragraphs raving about kiosks, let me see if I can cram everything into a sentence: follow HUD prompts to a quest marker, circle-strafe away from attackers till everybody is toast, spend your level-up points and make for the next objective, perhaps stopping en-route to upgrade or sell off some gear if you pass a vendor. You'll spot showers of sparks from droids fixing the flanks of walkways, and balconies stuffed with party-goers, just above the navigable plane. Some of these depths can be accessed by elevator or floating platform - transitions reminiscent of Abe's Oddysee's fore-to-background shifts - but enormous effort has been spent bringing life to places that can't be reached. Chance gaps and reinforced glass floors offer giddy views of hovercars slicing through disorderly canyons of tenements and factories, hundreds of metres beneath. But the game ably cultivates the impression of colossal depth. The vertical city premise is a bit sleight-of-hand: the world is functionally a series of flat planes linked by loading transitions, one that doesn't even see the need for a jump button. There's a base level of visual fascination to the way floor patterns and buildings map to, or tug against the axes of shooting and exploration suggested by the quasi-isometric viewpoint. The elevated diagonal perspective does a lot of work here, producing a landscape of corners that split the setting into lush, contrasting arrangements of colours and textures. The Ascent's city is catnip for digital flâneurs. It's easy to get lost, even when following the breadcrumb trail laid out by the HUD, and I don't mind one bit. The arcology's hub districts are a battle royale of adboards and Hangul script, a chaos of screens and reflections filtered through smog, the interweaving paths of delivery drones and the shuffling bodies of hundreds of weary NPCs. And how about that lighting? Polluted, gauzy, shifting, overwhelming. Each store is a delicate little treasure box, the lid peeling away when you step inside - neatly patterned with wares, like chips filling a circuit board. Open air markets of steam, textile and clanking metal. Fortified holes-in-the-wall staffed by philosophical robots. Soylent-green pharmacies and 24 hour kiosks with the fading aura of an impending hangover. Seriously, you never saw such shops! Armouries fringed by spinning, wireframe weapons. It's probably the lockdown talking, but I want to live in them. Availability: Out now on PC and Xbox One/Series S/X on Game Pass.But what The Ascent's world lacks in imagination and bite it almost makes up for in scale and an exhaustive, toymaker's commitment to the fine details. This is not one of your transgressive, norm-busting punk fictions - even Ruiner, its closest cousin, is a bolt from the blue by comparison. Admittedly, it also teems with cliches and callouts to the usual canonical works: William Gibson's phrase "high tech, low life", which flickers on displays throughout like a sorcerer's incantation Blade Runner's flourescent umbrella handles and melancholy synth score pirouetting holostrippers from any number of seedy sci-fi saloons an Oriental faction who worship honour and wield katanas. Its tiered alien megacity is one of the liveliest cyberpunk settings I've explored, always crawling with people and machines, whether you're massacring mutants in the sewers or gazing out from a boardroom window. The Ascent's arcology setting is splendid, if heavily derivative - shame that all you can do here is gun and grind.
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